Xbox Music heads to Android and iOS with free web streaming

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In their continued attempts to be a player in the digital entertainment industry, Microsoft has announced plans to open up Xbox Music to almost everything with a screen.

While the world has no shortage of decent music delivery services right now, the one thing nearly all seem to have in common is that they aren’t available on one platform or another. If you’ve given your music library to the cloud, or just prefer streaming audio as your music discovery method, it can be frustrating to find that you can’t replicate that experience on every screen you use.

Apple’s services are only available where Apple says so, and that is not a particularly long list. Google Play Music All Access is a great service as long as you don’t plan on a great experience outside of Chrome and Android. Microsoft is trying for the hat trick with Xbox Music, by making it available on their console, iOS, Android, and the web.

Microsoft’s musical history hasn’t exactly been amazing, as anyone with a Zune collecting dust on a shelf will tell you. Xbox Music is an attempt to fix that by making the music service available on nearly everything. This way, subscribers will be able to take their playlists from device to device, no matter what that device may be.

If you’re not sure you want to subscribe yet, Xbox Music on the web will allow for unlimited free streaming for anyone. It’s not a new plan, but one that has yielded positive results for those who have tried it in the past.

This all-inclusive strategy from Microsoft, which is similar in deployment to Xbox SmartGlass, shows that the company is willing to play nice with others if it means their users continue sitting in front of the Xbox at the end of the day. Music playback has been a popular feature on the Xbox consoles for a long time, but not until now has Microsoft decided to wield it as a feature important enough to become its own detached service.